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There are three elements to our "big data" efforts, or unhyped normal data efforts: Data Collection, Data Reporting, and Data Analysis.
(More on that here: DC-DR-DA: A Simple Framework For Smarter Decisions .)
We are all aware that the best companies in the world have an optimal DC-DR-DA allocation when it comes to time/money/people:
15%-20%-65%.
All well and good.
But there is one crucial part we often don't invest in sufficiently. The last mile. Data presentation! The actual output that is almost singularly responsible for driving
the change we want in our organizations. The thing that is the difference between an organization that data pukes and the one that influences actions based on
understandable insights.
I believe we should present our data as effectively as possible in order to first build our credibility, second to set ourselves apart from everyone else who can present
complicated graphs/charts/tables, and third allow our leadership teams to understand the singular point we are trying to make so that the discussion moves off data
very quickly and on to what to with the insights.
A vast majority of occasions where data is presented (reports, executive dashboards, conference presentations, or just plain here's a automated emailed thingy
from Google Analytics ) end up being abject failures because most of the discussion is still about the data. And if you are sitting in a Nth level tactical meeting, that
is ok. But if the occasion is a strategic discussion, any occasion about taking action on data, then you need to get off data as fast as you can.
It is hard to do. After all you spent so much time on collection, reporting and analysis. You want to show them all data stuff and how much you worked and how
cool your technique was. But trust me, it is better for your career (and, this is a lot less important, but much better for your company/audience :)) to get really,
really good at data presentation.
This post shares eight before and after examples that illustrate seven data presentation tips that I hope will inspire you to look at your report/dashboard/PowerPoint
slide in a new light. We will look at some simple errors, and some much more subtle ones that end up limiting our ability to communicate effectively with data.
Here's a quick summary:
#1. Don't be sloppy. Your data presentation is your brand.
#2. Bring insane focus, and simplify.
#3. Calibrate data altitude optimally.
#4. Eliminate distractions, make data the hero!
#5. Lines, bars, pies stress choose the best-fit.
#6. Consolidate data, be as honest as you can be.
#7. Ditch the text, visualize the story.
We are going to have a lot of fun, and learn some not-so-obvious lessons.
It's not the ink, it's the think.
An important point first.
This post is not about tufte'ing your work. It is not a post about expressing your inner Excel geek with the most advanced remastered sparklines or conditional
scatter plots. Advanced, sophisticated visualizations are important. But I find that so many times people focus on the ink and not the think . Hence all the insightsfree data visualizations floating around the web that are totally value-deficient, even as they are pretty.
In this post I simply want you to focus on the think and not the ink . What was the error in thinking? How can you ensure you never make that error? Then, go
express your inner visualization beast. :)
[My inspiration for a focus on the think: Bob Mankoff]
Lesson 1: Don't be sloppy. Your data presentation is your brand.
This graph is from an article by the consulting company McKinsey.
It actually shows very interesting data. The article is a bit dry, but valuable.
Yet, I could not get over how sloppy the graph was. For me, and perhaps for others, the sloppiness made the data appear to be an amateurish effort (surprising,
given the source) and took away from the deservedly mighty McKinsey brand.
Can you see what the problems are?
The first problem is that the title is weirdly placed. Then the y-axis legend is even more weirdly placed. The most important part seems to be to get the names of
the company, gigantic, over two lines and distracting.
Finally, this is picky, but why is most of the x-axis yearly and then suddenly just until Q2, 2013? And if it is only two quarters of data, why is it taking up the same
distance as represented by one year?
Surprisingly sloppy from McKinsey, right?
Watch out for these errors. People in the room (in a small room or a board room or a conference auditorium) will know a lot less about the data than you will, their
first impression, and often the lasting impression, might be how clean your data presentation is.
Even without access to the raw data (let's say I'm a busy McKinsey blog post writer), you can make a couple of simple changes to the graph to make it cleaner
and less sloppy
[Minor Rant: Never, ever, never obsess this much about CPCs. Yes, cost per click is metric. But if you had to obsess about something, obsess about the value
delivered to the business. You will never obsess about the cost per trade of your E-Trade portfolio, right? It could go down from $10 per trade to $1, and you could
have completely gone bankrupt as a result of your trades. So, don't obsess about CPC. Focus on Economic Value from your search advertising. Focus on Profit
from your search advertising. Focus on the outcome. As long as you make a profit, does it matter if your CPC is $1 or $200? And would it matter if your CPC went
from $200 to $1 if you were making no profit?]
The metric CPC aside, we do present data like this all the time.
The first challenge is that there is too much of it. We have actuals and we have the YOY change. Then we have it for the company and its category. Finally, we
have it segmented into desktop and mobile and as if that was not joyous enough, further segmented into Brand and Non-Brand.
As if that was not enough, the data presentation itself is a bit uninspired.
We can quickly fix it though.
First pick one primary thing to focus on. When you design dashboards this is absolutely critical.
In this case, I believe, the most interesting thing is the YOY change. I bring it center stage, and make the actual CPC as small as I possibly can (in case someone
wants it that desperately).
Next I create a simpler data presentation, God bless Excel, by creating two big clusters next to each other. Now it's just a matter of two similar columns that we
can distinguish with the use of color.
Here's the result
Again, something very quick you can do. (I'm sure like me you have a favorite custom font you use to make your presentations really yours.)
The orange and purple are easy on the eyes, and distinguish the two clusters nicely. The size of the font used makes the things that should stand out, stand out
easily.
Notice because the company performance is all in one row, it is much easier to see that their CPC year-over-year change is less than the category (something
harder to see in the original version).
Bring insane focus to your data presentation. If you can, focus on a singular metric for each module/slide/element. Then present the data as simply as you possibly
can. And often, you don't need to go very far from the defaults in Excel though you are welcome to use any software you want.
Lesson 3: Calibrate data altitude optimally.
Here's a more subtle error.
Ignore the ugly graph and the terribly formatted axis, time periods used, etc. All simple fixes.
Look at the text under the graph. Do you see the problem? Don't scroll any further. Look at it again, see the mistake made?
It is not completely obvious, but the Analyst is expecting that in the very short time the leadership team has to look at this data, that they'll also be clever enough
to do the math for each row, commit it to memory and then compare all four rows and figure out which video is performing better.
Terrible error in judgment. The altitude is all over the place!
You are the Analyst. You do the math. Then make the hard decisions and figure out how to present data as effectively as you possibly can.
In this case I had to decide what the key point was (this is the think part). I believe it was that using advertising to drive views of a video fueled organic views as
well.
That gave me the anchor, paid views. Then it was simply a matter of figuring out the best way to present the data. I decided to use an index of 100. All that's left
now is to do the math in Excel and paste it on to the dashboard
The recipient can get to the insight really fast because there is less data (fewer words and clutter), it is well thought out, and we can move to asking hard questions
about performance.
What the heck happened with Video B? And OMG what is up with Video D???
That is what you want, shift the discussion from the data to what happened and what to do now.
Bonus: As the smart Analyst that you are, at this point you'll realized Earned and Paid Views don't tell the full story. So you'll change the table to Total Views and
% Earned. You would not have known that's what you needed if you'd stuck with your original textual version! The value of focus and think .
Lesson 4: Eliminate distractions, make data the hero!
Raise your hand if you've not created a slide like the one below for your presentation. Come on!
My hand is raised.
We have all done this.
And it is so silly.
We take the most interesting part, the data, and surround it with clutter that only makes it harder to understand what the point is. The data is the hero, what is the
need to have the arrows and the box and the descriptions? Is there any need for the useless stock photos (and what is up with the magnifying glass to represent
research, who does that?)? And why repeat "use online sources," is that not obvious in the awfully crafted title?
Look at the image for a moment. Don't scroll. Stop. Really. Don't scroll. How would you decrapify this slide?
Got an answer? Ok, now scroll.
You can use different colors, mix to suit your own taste. Red in my case is to make the online usage stand out on a very large screen.
I'd experimented with having a break in the gray x-axis (yes, I worry about those things!), it looked nicer. But visually it ended up representing a break, rather than
the continuity that each stage represents. Hence the single line you see above.
If you spend sometime on the think , it is so much easier to decrapify the data presentation to focus on the most essential element and make data the hero (again,
so that you can get off the data very quickly and have a discussion about what the business should do).
Lesson 5: Lines, bars, pies stress choose the best-fit.
If you are a student of the Market Motive web analytics master certification course, you'll note my love for segmented trends rather than snapshots in time when it
comes to data presentation.
Trends are often better at delivering deeper insights. And because all data in aggregate is crap, segmented trends are even better!
But, as all smart analysts know, often is not always.
Here's a great example The dashboard module shows how American's consume media, and how that behavior has changed over the last four years.
Please take a minute and reflect on the graph. Do you love it? Does it communicate the change optimally?
You'll agree, the graph is nice and clean. It is easy to understand what is going on. Sure we can line up the numbers on the right correctly, but that is a minor
point.
As a Digital Marketing Evangelist, you can imagine I love the data. : ) I was not sure that I love the line graph.
I felt it would take too long to understand just how much things had changed. People would spend too much time trying to understand the graph. And even then, at
a deep gut level, not internalize it (even though to you perhaps it is utterly obvious).
My decision was to eliminate the trend. Except for TV, the trends adds almost no value (and even for TV just a little). This allowed me to switch the x-axis to each
media channel, they were the heroes here. And finally, switch to a bar graph.
Here's the result.
I believe this version shows the change much more starkly and since you can look at one channel at a time, you can absorb the change much, much faster than
with the line graph.
While with the line graph you could see people spent more time with digital than with TV in 2013. The big rise in digital consumption vs. 2010 is much more obvious
now. And while TV is physically from Digital in the above picture, you can easily see that one is much higher than the other.
Remember, often is not always. Question how you've always done things. Even question your teacher who might love segmented trended graphs! : )
Understand who your audience is, think about the point you are trying to make with your analysis, and then use the best-fit data presentation method.
Lesson 6: Consolidate data, be as honest as you can be.
This example comes from a presentation. The data was spread over two slides. Notice how nicely it is presented.
The first slide showed the desktop and laptop performance for search traffic for puppies (real data below, just not that category!)
It is easy to see how puppies are doing in context of the average number of searches for land animals and sea animals. Put another way, company performance
compared to two benchmarks.
The second slide illustrated the mobile search performance for puppies, and compared it to the same categories
In an attempt to pay an homage to the importance of mobile, changed the color to red
To our leadership team, the recipient of our presentation, it is really clear how we are performing overall and in mobile.
It is also clear that desktop plus tablet, blue, is the most important area of focus. We have to keep the pedal to the metal when it comes to that. But that mobile is
also an important area deserving some dedicated focus.
There is no chance that they will inadvertently think the size of both the opportunities is the same.
An effective presentation of data by 1. consolidating it and 2. having it play off the same y-axis.
Lesson 7: Ditch the text, visualize the story.
Often we hear that data is overwhelming or that graphs are evil or that tables suck or well, I'm sure you've heard it all.
Our response to that is to try and "simplify the story" by eliminating all that and just writing the insights in text with a big summary number.
That strategy does work some times. More often than not you end up with something super-ugly and value-deficient like this
Imagine yourself to be sitting in the audience and trying to internalize everything that's going on here! I'm sure someone is going to walk you through it. But still. Do
you think there is any chance you can grasp the multiple agendas at play above?
I seriously doubt it. Scroll back up. Look at it!
Even if you only have two minutes, all I had in this case, it is pretty easy to fix the above textual representation and make it much easier to understand what is
going on.
First, get your custom font. Ok, kidding.
First, think of what the key point is and replace the long red-book ended title with it. In this case: Search Opportunity.
Then draw a bar in PowerPoint, eyeball the size (no, really, don't even go in Excel to create the graph, no one is going to notice!), and fill in the sub-components.
For data you can't find an obvious home for, use call-outs.
Two minutes later
So much easier to see that story is about how many people search for our company topics and that weight management and monitors are the most interesting. In
this case we have the data that can fill out rest of the bar, but we want the leadership team/audience to focus on just two and those are the ones you see above.
It is less obvious how to illustrate the mobile growth. Two more bars? Perhaps a heat-map showing high and low? Nah! Just add two call-outs and you are done!
When the data's end state is a PowerPoint/Keynote presentation, use the fade transition (all other transitions are evil) and bring one piece of data at a time up on
the screen. It will look beautiful and the audience with stay with you as you narrate other insights you know that are not represented on the slide. [A style of
presentation you should use every time you present anything.]
Here's another example of eliminating text, reducing complexity, focusing the the key point and visualizing data simply to get off the data quickly and discuss
actions.
Pause. Look at the example below. What is done right or done erroneously? If you had to improve on the power of communication for this example, what would you
do?
Pause. Really think about it. Got it? Now scroll.
The first simple mistake you likely won't make as an analyst is to use two different things to represent the same number. For example, either stick to the dollars or
use the percentage. This might not seem like a big deal in isolation, but every little bit like this takes a tiny bit of your credibility away and it causes the audience
to have to shift their minds a little. Over a number of these types of mistakes in your dashboard or your presentation take away 0.25% here and 0.5% there and 1%
somewhere else. Taken together, you lose 30%. Why dig that hole for yourself to have to climb out of?
The second simple mistake, obvious in hindsight I'm sure, is that there is simply too much text. Why not simplify the data presentation to make it boom (!)
impactful right away?
I did like the map, but it was intrusive. So my first act was to take the map, fade it out (use a white transparency, 13%). It is there, but it is not in the way.
Then I did not like the numbers, they don't add any value. Just throw in two simple bars (standard shape in PowerPoint, no Excel necessary), and add a touch of
color to show targeting efficiency of TV and Radio. Finally add the bridging text and use the brace (use the little yellow handle to drag the brace so it is aligned) to
show how well or badly each media channel is doing.
Red is bad, blue is good.
Scroll back up. Then back down. Then up. Then down. (Think of the Old Spice ad! :)
The presentation is simpler. Even without reading anything you can get a sense for what is good and bad. The questions will come fast and loose: Why do we do
TV? And if there is 75% leakage, is it still worth it? What is the optimal media-mix for our efforts?
We believe that summarizing our findings in text is the solution. We believe tables and graphs add complexity. We could not be further from the truth.
Closing Thoughts.
It's not the ink, it's the think.
It takes a tiny amount of time to really look at the data you are presenting, really think about what you are trying to say and identify the singular point. Once you
know that, it is only a couple of minutes of work to decrapify the report/dashboard/slide/spreadsheet and ensure we are presenting data as simply as possible
using the most optimal visual.
You worked so hard to collect the data. Then invested all that time and energy in reporting it. Finally, really dug deep, did the analysis. Don't stop there. Spend
time optimizing the end product. Your goal: Get of the data as fast as you can, switch to the discussion of actions.
Victory, I promise, will be yours!
As always, it is your turn now.
Which one of the eight examples above is your favorite? And the least? Would you have taken a radically different approach on any one of them? Care to share
your version? What are your go to filters for taking something complicated and making it simple? What is your favorite annoying data presentation method? Is there
a visualization strategy that consistently helps you switch the discussion from talking about the data to talking about what to do with the insights?
Please share your insights, recommendations, critique, alternatives and complaints via comments.
Thank you.
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February 25, 2014 Filed Under: Advanced Analytics, Digital Analytics, Digital Marketing, Marketing Tips, Search Engine Marketing, Web Analytics, Web Insights
Tagged With: actionable web analytics, competitive intelligence, key performance indicators, paid search analysis, web metrics trends comparison
Comments
1. Bhagawat Jadhav says:
If you want to share your graph with me, I can take a look at it and share a specific recommendation.
-Avinash.
REPLY
3. Tim Wilson says:
Rebecca: That is a brilliant insight! We get caught in the trap of giving our senior leadership what they want.
I've found that if your audience is asking you for more and more data (and to make your dashboards and presentation complicated and "data rich")
there are two things that are happening:
1. Your leadership does not trust you and your skills. Perhaps because you are new or they don't have confidence in you. Then they want to know
more and more because they want to be extra sure. Try to earn their confidence in this case.
2. The insights I'm delivering based on the insights are not good enough. Because I can't "distract" them with the good insights, valuable actions to
take, they are left with just looking at the data and critiquing it. Find better insights in this case, spend more time on that.
Thank you for sharing your fantastic comment and letting me share these two tips.
Avinash.
REPLY
Rebecca says:
February 27, 2014 at 18:13
Exactly! That's the whole point! After I started taking some time to think "what am I gonna say that'll be absolutely killer?", "what do they
wanna know when I show these numbers?", "where do they want to get when finding about this"?, it stopped happening.
Now I can do my analysis , get to the point faster, work around theories with the slides and, as you said, tell a story through math. =)
It was difficult though. At first, all you think about is "omg, critiques again". I had an awesome "Assertiveness & Communication" course and
it sure helped a lot.
For those that still have to deal with it, I mostly recommend it. =)
REPLY
6. Jeroen Bouserie says:
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Matthew: You are absolutely right, the legend is very important and should always be included.
I end up creating most of my visuals to present as a part of a keynote I give. In those cases I even remove the legend because I'll use transition and
you'll see the blue bars come up first and I'll talk about them, then I click and the red bars will come up and I'll talk about the contrasts. But because
I'm introducing each element there is no need for a legend.
But posted on this blog as a picture, the legend is sorely missed.
-Avinash.
REPLY
Josh Braaten says:
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One good mindset approach for someone presenting data is to assume himself / herself is the one who needs to make the decision. Then ask yourself, what
/ how would you like data to be to make the decision?
REPLY
14. Josh Braaten says:
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I work mainly with PPC/AdWords data, and have trying lately to use the R language to better visualize the data (see my thoughts here:
http://uk.queryclick.com/seo-news/visualising-adwords-data-using-r/). Whilst still rough in presentation, the tenet of 'It's not the ink, it's the think' has proved
to be very beneficial and a bit of a revelation for me.
REPLY
18. Moe Kamal, Jr. says:
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Sometimes we tend to write a lot of things and lose our focus on interpreting or explaining more about the data presented.
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28. BP says:
March 26, 2014 at 21:39
Well i am not so good in making presentations for my business, But what an article you have shared with us!
I can easily learn and apply all the tips and tricks on my next presentation.
Many Thanks.
REPLY
Trackbacks
1. Mark eting Day: February 25, 2014 says:
February 25, 2014 at 14:03
[] 7 Data Presentation Tips: Think, Focus, Simplify, Calibrate, Visualize, http://www.kaushik.net []
2. Decrapifying Data Presentation | User Experience Research says:
February 25, 2014 at 18:02
[]
I really enjoyed todays blog post from the famous Googler and entrepreneur Avinash Kaushik on tips for data presentation, particularly the importance of
moving discussion quickly off data and onto insights and actions.
[]
3. 7 Ways To Be the Most Interesting Person in Any Room, and More Rogers Pick s | Neuromark eting says:
February 28, 2014 at 06:29
[]
Does your brain check out when charts and graphs pop up on a screen? The versatile Avinash Kaushik teaches us how to make a lasting positive
impression, even when presenting otherwise boring data. There are plenty of helpful (and illustrated!) tips in 7 Data Presentation Tips: Think, Focus, Simplify,
Calibrate, Visualize++. Data doesnt have to be a cure for insomnia!
[]
4. Read these articles this week : | Abdo Shalaby! says:
March 1, 2014 at 22:05
[]
7 Data Presentation Tips: Think, Focus, Simplify, Calibrate, Visualize
[]
5. Great data visualization post says:
March 14, 2014 at 10:36
[]
I intend to write a longer post on dasbboards for direct marketing, but for now Id like to share a great post on data presentation tips: 7 Data Presentation
Tips: Think, Focus, Simplify, Calibrate, Visualize
Avinash Kaushik is a data guru and a data driven marketing thought leader. You should follow his blog!
[]
6. Visualizacin de datos | el blog de yago says:
March 22, 2014 at 06:34
[] Ejemplo errores Avinash []
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Evangelist - Google, Cofounder - Market Motive.
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